The author cannot possibly really think that: “The result is that China effectively has no tradition of realistically notating vernacular speech. Wenyanwen ???, classical Chinese, exerted a virtual stranglehold on written literature up until the early twentieth century, and even then, most writers did not attempt to accurately represent common speech…”

People were writing in various forms of the vernacular from the Tang on. The amount of fiction and drama written in some from of vernacular from the Song on is truly massive. Yes, certain genres were always written in some register of literary Chinese, but does it really make sense to ignore ????????????????etc., etc.? It really is surprising how people fully swallow the extraordinarily narrow orthodox May Fourth view of the history of literature in China.

The “Why Chinese…” piece is popular and interesting, but conflates spoken and written languages is a way that is ultimately confusing and even deceptive.

@Michael: The page has disappeared. But IIRC correctly a larger percentage of the commenters on the piece were more sympathetic than I might have expected. Now that it’s online here I’ll probably start getting mail on it. (I receive a lot of messages of appreciation for the English original.)